Pipeline - A Unique Heist Movie of a Highly Unusual Object

I read on the Catchplay+ promotion news that there was this new Korean movie to be released on Saturday, 6 November. Since the premise looked interesting, I wanted to give it a try immediately. But after realizing that the movie only played at 9 PM, I opted to see it on Sunday instead. This time I watched it by myself as my wife was watching a series that she wanted to finish. Anyway, let's get on with it.

Brief Story Line

Drill-Bit (Seo In-guk - No Breathing, The Smile Has Left Your Eyes TV series etc) was a notorious drilling engineer who was able to steal oil from the pipeline using his specific skill set and equipment. When a wealthy oil refinery owner named Geon-woo (Lee Soo-hyuk - Runway Cop, Born Again TV series etc) planned to steal a large amount of oil from the main pipeline running through South Korea, he decided to recruit Drill-Bit even if his price was very high.

With the help from the welder (Eum Moon-suk), Big Shovel aka Geun-sab (Tae Hang-ho), Chief Na (Yoo Seung-mok) who had vast knowledge of the underground pipelines and the only woman who was known as Counter (Bae Da-bin), Drill-Bit had to do the task in limited time, otherwise they would bear heavy penalty and punishment from Geon-woo. Things got complicated when patrol police officer Man-sik (Bae Yoo-ram) suspected that Drill-Bit was doing something big and tried his best to capture him.

So how would the story conclude? Find them all in this action movie.

End of Brief Story Line

As I mentioned above, I was interested in watching this movie because of the premise. The idea of stealing oil from the pipeline going through the country was really fresh and intriguing, as it was uncommon. When I started watching it, I was quite happy that the characters involved in the movie were pretty interesting and the story itself was not that hard to grasp. The technical aspect in here was not really emphasized and made it easier to understand. However, since I am not an engineer, I could not say whether everything here were technically correct. 

Like I said earlier, the characters were quite interesting, even though not all of them were given detailed background scenes of how they were recruited. I thought the welder was having a larger than expected screen time (he was the one who provided comical relief in this movie). Meanwhile we only got to know Drill-Bit's brief background through conversation. Lee Soo-hyuk on the other hand was given proper context on reason he became villain and I think his performance was fantastic, truly suitable as the bad guy. Another character who gave a bit of color was Chief Na who was played nicely by Yoo Seung-mok. Btw, I was not familiar with any of the cast, but in general they were quite OK in their roles.

The oil stealing story made this felt a bit like a heist movie. It has some surprising twists as well which made it more entertaining. The story pace was pretty standard, but the suspense somehow did not feel too consistent, and I thought the most intense was during the finale. There were some action involved in here though not very spectacular kind. It has a duration of 108 minutes including the closing credit where we would be accompanied by some funny scenes along with a very cheerful song that my wife noticed even while she was watching something else. The movie was directed by Yoo Ha (prior works including Marriage is a Crazy Thing, Gangnam Blues etc).

Overall to me this was a unique heist movie of a highly unusual object. It has some interesting characters that would engage you, but surprisingly no melodramatic moment that is commonly found in Korean movie. It was a film that was quite successful in South Korea when it was released end of May 2021. As it never played in Indonesia theaters, it was a good thing we could see this on Catchplay+ (without additional fee). So if you are interested with the above characteristics, give this a try. You might find yourself enjoying the movie like I did.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars